Why We’re in a New Gilded Age by Paul Krugman

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95 Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque—defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. Still, today’s economic elite is very different from that of the nineteenth century, isn’t it? Why?

How Tesla Will Change The WorldThis is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.”Kapital for the Twenty-First Century?Kapital for the Twenty-First Century? Thomas Piketty, 2011 (Parti Socialiste du Loiret/Flickr) Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press, 2014, 671 pp.Economic Policy in a Post-Piketty WorldThomas Piketty. (Photo: Parti Socialiste du Loiret / flickr) Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, has done a remarkable job of focusing public attention on the growth of inequality in the last three decades and the risk that it will grow further in the decades ahead. Piketty’s basic point on this issue is almost too simple for economists to understand: if the rate of return on wealth (r) is greater than the rate of growth (g), then wealth is likely to become ever more concentrated. This raises the obvious question of what can be done to offset this tendency towards rising inequality? Piketty’s answer is that we need a global wealth tax (GWT) to redistribute from the rich to everyone else.

The Piketty Panic - NYTimes.com“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”The end of capitalism has begunThe red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.

On Piketty and definitions. ‘Financial capital’ is not the same thing as ‘physical capital’ (two graphs)The discussion about Piketty is getting messed up. The vagueness of economic parlance allows people to accuse him of mistakes he doesn’t make. The meaning of the word ‘capital’ is a case in point. Financial capital (like bonds, cash, receivables (which are included in the estimates of financial wealth in the national accounts and which have the same magnitude as cash, deposit money and money in savings account combined)) are not the same thing as physical capital (houses, cars, buildings, machinery and the like). Financial capital is to quite some extent owned by old, retired women. Physical capital is used by people at work.Piketty's "Capital," in a Lot Less Than 696 Pages - Justin Foxby Justin Fox | 8:00 AM April 24, 2014 It was only published in English a few weeks ago, but French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already become inescapable. The reasons start with the confluence of subject matter and author. There’s a lot of interest in economic inequality these days, and research conducted over the past 15 years by Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, is a big reason why. In the U.S., Piketty and UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez transformed a tame discussion of income quintiles and deciles into a sharp debate about the skyrocketing incomes of the 1% — and the mind-boggling gains of the 0.1% and 0.01% — by gathering and publishing income tax data that nobody had bothered with before. Piketty was behind similar projects in France, Britain, Japan, and other countries.

Thomas Palley » Blog Archive » The accidental controversialist: deeper reflections on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a six hundred and eighty-five page tome that definitively characterizes the empirical pattern of income and wealth inequality in capitalist economies over the past two hundred and fifty years, and especially over the last one hundred. It also documents the grotesque rise of inequality over the past forty years and ends with a call for restoration of high marginal income tax rates and a global wealth tax. His book has tapped a nerve and become a phenomenon.

TheMoneyIllusion » Krugman vs. SmithNoah Smith recently did a post discussing the long period of deflation in Japan, and noted that NK models generally predict that wages and prices should eventually adjust to restore full employment. Paul Krugman criticized Smith as follows: No, the only reason deflation “works” in the standard model is that it increases the real money supply, which leads to lower interest rates; in effect, it acts like an expansionary monetary policy.But Japan has been in a liquidity trap during the whole period Smith looks at. Monetary expansion is ineffective unless it can raise expectations of future inflation. Deflation is definitely not going to help.

Can-an-Economists-Theory-Apply-to-ArtPhoto Thomas Piketty is a name on a lot of people’s lips at the moment. The French economist’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” is a historic survey of wealth concentration that has quickly become a go-to text for the gathering debate on income inequality. In his book, published in English last month, Mr. Piketty argues that the rich are only going to get richer as a result of free-market capitalism.